Oysters and crocodiles: a rest day on the Gambia river

Twelve days into a rally that started in Gibraltar, we finally stopped
driving. The rest day was always going to be spent on the water – The
Gambia exists because of its river, and skipping it would have meant
driving through the country without meeting it.

Ours happened around Mandina, near Lamin, where the river frays into
mangrove creeks and the main business is oysters. They grow on the mangrove
roots, and the people who harvest them wear old jeans into the water,
because the shells are sharp enough to open skin. The boat took us out to
an island whose name I never caught, where the collectors live – and where
nothing gets wasted: the shells end up underfoot as walking paths, or
burned down to a powder that does the job of cement. The families there
live, quite literally, on ground their own harvest built.

The oysters themselves cost almost nothing here. It was the wrong season to
actually eat any, which stung a little – though to be fair, there was no
champagne either.

The part I hesitated over was stepping in. The river has a sizable
crocodile population, and the locals' reassurance was that these crocodiles
never eat humans. Never, they said. I stood at the edge for a moment,
weighing who to trust – the people who live on this water every day, or
every instinct I had – and got in.

There is a footnote to the day. We had booked an eco-lodge on the river for
two nights, for the experience, and the booking fell through. It annoyed us
until we visited the place the next day: no air conditioning against that
heat, and mosquitos that treated the rooms as theirs. We would not have
lasted one night, let alone two. We drove back to our beds by the beach
quietly grateful to whatever it was that went wrong.